I downloaded DBD::Oracle and did a grep for the words in the error string you posted. The search came up empty. This means that either you posted the error incorrectly, or the error is not coming from DBD::Oracle. I did a wider Google search for this error. This search also produced no hits, which lends credence to the idea that the message got garbled in your post. On the other hand, if the error message is genuine then it must come from either your script or from Oracle, itself. If the latter, what does the Oracle documentation say about it?